


youth is given up to illusions

by freckledpoet



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alternate Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-10-08 12:09:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10386336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freckledpoet/pseuds/freckledpoet
Summary: “Hello,” Francis replied evenly, meeting his eyes, and I wondered if he still held any bitterness against his old lover or if Charles did the same. Depending on the way you look at it, it was a moment of soap opera-like significance, Francis and his two greatest loves confronting each other at his wedding, and although I was reasonably sure that only Charles knew what happened in my dorm room between Francis and myself that night, I was also sure that Charles knew I was aware of his and Francis’s shared history. A secret history, as are all the histories of boys loving boys, concealed behind closed doors and dark rooms and lies we tell ourselves. How strangely connected were we all, clinging to each other’s history: Henry and Bunny and Camilla, Charles and Francis and me.An alternate ending to The Secret History.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Something I wrote all weekend instead of studying for the SATs. Title is from The Awakening by Kate Chopin.
> 
> Playlist for this fic, in chronological order (aka the music I listened to while writing this):
> 
> 1\. I Negate (Seoul)  
> 2\. Boston (Augustana)  
> 3\. Sunday Morning (The Velvet Underground)  
> 4\. Friday I’m In Love (The Cure)  
> 5\. Where Soul Meets Body (Death Cab for Cutie)  
> 6\. Hand in Glove (The Smiths)  
> 7\. Love Will Tear Us Apart (Joy Division)  
> 8\. America (Simon and Garfunkel)  
> 9\. Solsbury Hill (Peter Gabriel)  
> 10\. I Melt With You (Modern English)  
> 11\. Tunnel of Love (Dire Straits)
> 
> (please someone listen to this I spent some time putting it together and I'd actually cry)

I had finally accepted that it was time to give up on Camilla- in the romantic sense, at least, because I knew then that even as a friend she would forever own part of my soul- but as I was reminded all too graphically by his recent brush with death, I would not- could not- allow myself to give up on Francis. The four days I spent in Boston with my dearest friends rekindled a spark of intense affection, which with time grew into an extraordinary fondness. I recognize now that I had never been able to connect so intimately with anyone else, not even Sophie, before or since my year at Hampden. My time there had sealed itself off like a flying ship in a bottle, sails fluttering in the Vermont breeze, beautiful but forever inaccessible to me. Still, although I was all too conscious that I could never recreate the glory of those days, I began my own efforts to salvage what I could of my friendships. Without telling anybody I began making arrangements to move to the East Coast permanently, starting by finishing my dissertation and mailing it, along with my apologies, to the head of the graduate department at my school. I leased my apartment, arranged to have my things shipped to a storage unit in Cambridge, and sent a three-page letter to Sophie explaining my decision. I spent my nights, when I wasn’t at the hospital with Francis or attending an endless stream of social functions with the Abernathys- I was staying with Francis’s mother and Chris by that point, at their lavish apartment on Beacon Hill- poring over The Globe and The Herald for part-time positions, perhaps in a bookstore.

When confronted about it by Francis (“You know how much I appreciate you coming up, Richard, and of course I’ll always welcome your company, but you have a life back in California! A fianceé!”) I simply shrugged and mumbled excuses. Sophie and I had broken up, I informed him, and I no longer spoke to my parents. My job as a part-time assistant to a philosophy professor at my university was ending, and I had nothing else lined up. I had finished my education. I’d always hated California, you know that, Francis. There was truly nothing left for me there. The other Abernathys offered no such protestations: they were simply delighted to have me for as long as I could possibly stay. I appreciated the sentiment, despite my aversion to the dinner parties and engagement celebrations they insisted on showing me off at (“Susan! You simply must meet Francis’s friend from school! This is Richard Papen, from California!”), but a day before Francis was released from the hospital into a private room at the Betty Ford Center I moved into my own apartment, just around the corner from Newbury Street where I was to start my new job at Avenue Victor Hugo Books.

I enjoyed my work in the bookstore, a spacious brick-and-mortar structure bursting with the new and used, leather-bound and paperback, everything from first editions of Byron to cheap pulp fiction from the 1950s. When I got off every evening at five I would pick up some falafel or steaming egg rolls, cheap foreign fare or simple potato salad from the nearest deli, and settle down with my Moleskine notebook in the Boston Public Gardens to write. Something about being surrounded with ink and paper forty hours a week had inspired me, a sometimes reluctant academic, to pick up poetry, and I filled pages and pages fumbling to describe the snow-covered apple blossoms around Hampden, the constellations of Francis’s freckles and the exact shade of Camilla’s hair. As the streetlights began to flicker on I would made the trek to the Betty Ford, a hideous concrete structure crouching along the Charles River like an angry gargoyle, to fetch Francis for our evening walk. At first an aide was sent to accompany us, always tagging a few paces behind like a neglected puppy, but as the summer wore on we were permitted to set off alone, ambling through the cobblestone streets and flower gardens of private parks, past townhouses whose sun-dusted brick I imagined was older than London, more ancient even than Rome, the quintessential feel of Old Boston.

On our first few strolls Francis stayed unusually quiet, and I worried that he secretly hated my presence, but when he did speak it quickly became apparent he was still morose about his upcoming marriage. The ceremony was set for December, in New York, and according to Francis, his suicide attempt had done nothing to sway his grandfather’s mind. He had managed, in recent weeks, to avoid seeing Priscilla (“The one advantage of being shut up in that hellhole all day”) but his feelings toward her remained unchanged and when I dared to suggest, again, that he reject the agreement and live on his own terms, he became uncharacteristically angry with me.

“Look, Richard, you’ve been incredibly kind to me, coming here to see me every day,” he snapped one evening in July, ignoring my feeble attempts to backtrack, “and you’re quite possibly my best friend in the world, but don’t tell me how to deal with my family, all right?”

“I was just trying to help.”

“I know,” he said, and I could see in his eyes that his sudden anger wasn’t really directed toward me at all, which would’ve made it only a little better even if I couldn’t sense his obvious pain. “Please. Just let’s not talk about it.”

So I told him about my work, about the stray tabby I found wandering the street outside my apartment one day, taken in and christened Plato, about what I was reading and the poetry I was writing. Francis’s eyes lit up at that, and he insisted on reading my work right then and there. To appease him, I dug my Moleskine out of my overcoat pocket and sat beside him on a park bench while he leafed through the pages, looking at my shoes, the swanboats, the children splashing in the park fountain, anywhere but at him. When he finished he tapped my shoulder to get my attention, and I found myself staring at his long, freckled fingers, almost classical in shape, fingers that belonged to a piano player in a Rococo painting.

“Richard, this is-” Fingertips brushing the nape of my neck, my hair. I shivered involuntarily.

“I know. I just started. I told you not to expect anything too great from me.”

“No, this is amazing.” I could hear him shuffling the pages again; I still hadn’t looked at him. “I do believe I’ve discovered the next Shakespeare, darling. This line? Right here-”-finger jabbing at the messy loops of my pen- “exactly how I’ve always felt about Henry. His intelligence and his strength as complements of each other, that darker vein running through his psyche? I don’t know how you ever managed to put that into words as beautifully as you did. You have real talent, darling.”

“Shakespeare wrote sonnets,” I managed to say.

“Quite right.” He turned a page. “T. S. Eliot, then.”

Darling- two times in the last minute he had called me that. Maybe it was all in my head, maybe I was making too much of it, but I felt lightheaded and strange and dizzy with the revelation of how much I liked it. I took my notebook from him and pocketed it, suddenly conscious of the lines I had devoted to him, his smatterings of freckles, the shape of his face. What had he read? I was suddenly tongue-tied, a blushing teenager back in Plano. “Thank you, Francis.” 

“No, thank you, darling.” He was up and moving, hands in his overcoat pockets, whistling jauntily. I ran to catch up with him, now winding his way toward the willows trailing their fronds in the still twilight waters of the pond. The sun dappled his face with lacy gold and drew out the amber in his hair, provoking thoughts- lips, hands, tangled limbs- that I hurried to push away. What was wrong with me? “Where are we going, Francis?”

He paused to sweep aside a curtain of willow fronds, holding them above my head to usher me into the tree’s cool embrace. His eyes were dark and sparkling with barely concealed mischief. “After you.”

It was green and lovely underneath the willow, a musty smell of earth rising from the roots and water lapping its way over the slick stone to seep into my shoes, the good ones of Italian leather I had splurged on with my last paycheck. I ran my fingers over the knotty bark of the trunk, feeling the texture in between the ridges of my skin, wanting to imprint the memory of the afternoon as deep as my bones, when I became conscious of an arm encircling my waist and Francis’s lips dragging slowly over my neck, my cheek before he leaned in and kissed me for real, the same taste of tea and cigarettes I remembered from my dorm room at Hampden that April night, only hours after we killed Bunny, lifetimes and lifetimes ago.

He released me suddenly, stepped back and said “Well?” to what I’m sure was my stunned face. He was smirking, but I could see the seriousness of the question lurking deep in his eyes and I became suddenly aware of how the next few seconds would decide everything. If I shook my head, pulled back, stumbled away, nothing between us would ever be the same again.

So I did the only thing I could do. I kissed him back, kissed him as the sun slipped below the horizon and the water licked at the hems of our pants, kissed him as the fireflies hummed their way around our heads in the dark of the summer night, kissed him in front of what I imagined was all of Boston because I loved him, had ever since that night in my dorm room, loved him in a way separate than how I had loved Julian or Henry or Charles or Camilla but loved him because he was Francis Abernathy, nonetheless.

When he finally pulled away, my hair was disheveled, my tie crooked and I was flushed and grinning from pleasure. A shade had been pulled down on the world and for a few blissful minutes, the first I’d experienced since Bunny’s death, I was drugged and dizzy from forgetting. Nothing else mattered- only Francis’s hands in my hair, my hands sliding up to cup his face, and his lips on mine, so hard and fast I could barely breathe. We were both a little desperate, I think from wanting. I walked him home through the slow-falling dusk, arm and arm, and before he turned to go in he pressed one last ghost of a kiss to my lips, lingering and sweet. Try as I might, I could never quite capture the flavor of it on paper.

Francis and I ended up spending quite a bit of time together that summer, as you might imagine. The day he was released from the Betty Ford Center (a Sunday in August, heat glimmering over the pavement in waves) he moved his things in with me. “Hope you don’t mind, I need a break from my family for a while and Priscilla doesn’t know where you live. Of course I’d be more than happy to pay my share of the rent,” he explained. I assured him that no, of course I didn’t mind his company, in fact I welcomed it, and we began the slow and sometimes confusing process of turning from friends into lovers. We still took walks together in the evenings, although these were slow and peppered with kisses stolen in a thousand hidden nooks- in an alleyway, under a lamppost in the dark, on my favorite bridge over the Charles, the one bearing the plaque to commemorate where the late Faulkner character Quentin Compson jumped to his death in The Sound and the Fury.

Between all of this there was dancing and picnics and wine and the cat, diners we went to at 1 am that blur together in my mind in a swirl of fluorescent lighting. Francis’s vinyl collection- Greatest Hits of Frank Sinatra, David Bowie, The Smiths. (“Hand in Glove” always reminded me of myself and Francis, surreptitiously holding hands at crosswalks and on park benches despite glares from other passers-by.) And, of course, our ceaseless discovery of each other’s bodies.

The first time Francis crawled into my bed, it was two o’clock in the morning and he was shaking from a nightmare, something involving Bunny quoting vaguely threatening messages in Latin at him and the vengeful ghost of Julian even though Julian, as far as we knew, was not in fact dead. I drew him close and pulled the covers over both of us, stroking his back until we both fell into a fitful sleep. The second time, at eleven, fully awake but half-dressed in his silk pajamas, his motives were not as pure. But considering that the first thing he ever said to me was to ask me to come to bed with him, what happened that night- and many nights afterward- seemed long overdue.

The fact that Francis was engaged barely registered with me. He saw Priscilla as little as he could arrange to, always at his mother’s house on Beacon Hill or out to lunch at some of the most exclusive restaurants in Boston under the watchful eye of his grandfather, and would return home thoroughly exhausted but with side-splitting stories about, as he called her, “The Black Hole.” Still, the wedding preparations and most of all Priscilla’s stupidity, his family’s ignorant but well-meaning gestures and his grandfather’s wrath, more than annoyed him; depressed him, and sometimes for hours afterward he would lie on the couch bemoaning his fate. It was nearly September the fourth or fifth time this happened and I had, quite frankly, grown sick of it.

“Look, Francis,” I said to him crossly, in the midst of one of these fits, “no one’s forcing you to marry Priscilla.”

I suppose I thought this would snap him out of it though we had been over this the very first afternoon in April when I visited him in the hospital. The fact is that I hated thinking about, and whenever possible avoided speaking about, what would happen would Francis was safely married off and secured in some stunning penthouse apartment in New York. I had never before experienced a relationship to this depth and could not bear the thought of being left alone to the empty apartment and my low-paying job, which by this point seemed more than a little static and dry.

It stunned me when instead of letting off another wail, he picked up his head and glared at me from his position on the couch. When he spoke, it was evident that he had attempted a condescending tone, but his voice was low and frail.

“We’ve covered this, Richard. I have to marry Priscilla or my grandfather will cut me off without a cent.” He avoided looking at my face; my eyes, I’m sure, betrayed all the hurt of a wounded deer left for dead on a remote country road.

“You can work, you know.”

“Oh, sure,” he scoffed derisively.

“Why not? There’s no shame in it. I work.” (I refrained myself from saying that all he did all day was lay in bed smoking and occasionally flip through some of his college books in Greek.) “Really, Francis, how do you think your family got all their money? Besides, there’s your stipend from your mother and Chris. You’ll get by.”

When he spoke again, his voice barely rose above a whisper, and I had to strain to hear him. “But you’re used to it,” he said miserably, toying without the burnt end of his cigarette, smearing tiny flakes of ash on his skin. “I’m not used to it.”

“Francis, you live with me.” I was on the verge of tears, and I’m sure he could tell, but he stubbornly refused to meet my eyes. “We have enough to eat. We go out together, and you still have enough to buy a silk necktie once in a while if you want it. For God’s sake, Francis, we’re happy. Does it really come down to just the money? Are you really willing to throw your whole life away being miserable?”

I hadn’t noticed how hard I was crying til I heard Francis get up and put his arms around me, cradling my head in his arms. Through my blind tears I reached out and grabbed his shirtfront, twisting the fabric between my fingers, and he bent down to put his lips against my ear. “There, there, darling,” he soothed. “It’s going to be all right.”

Around a week later we had worked it out, worked through it so smoothly I had actually begun to consider the possibilities of a lifetime with Francis. I was twenty-seven, he was twenty-eight, still young in the grand scheme of our lives but old and jaded enough to be aware that we were not guaranteed infinite amounts of time. But it was still more astonishing to realize that I found myself so deeply in love I allowed myself to dream in a way I hadn’t before. Not with the forgettable string of girls in Plano and Hampden and everywhere in between, not in the distant, puppylike kind of love I cherished for Camilla (Was it love or just infatuation?), and not even with Sophie, though I had already been engaged once. Sophie, I had begun to realize, was a compromise. I liked Sophie, even Francis liked Sophie, and I didn’t at all hold what happened against her, for we were simply different and hopelessly incompatible people.

Before I could worry myself about the future, however, we had business to take care of on the technical end of it. Francis quietly informed his close family that he would not be getting married, and they seemed to take it surprisingly well, although in the case of Francis’s mother that might have spoken more to her own self-absorption than love for her son. We agreed between us that he would take it upon himself to notify Priscilla, and I was in charge of calling his grandfather, whom I had never met. Having Francis’s secret lover inform the Abernathy patriarch over the telephone of his grandson’s abrupt dissolution of his arranged marriage seemed like a terrible idea to me both then and now, but Francis flat-out refused to do it and no one else was willing. So it was on a quiet day in September, immediately after Francis met with Priscilla (“It wasn’t actually that terrible, she seemed confused mostly and started talking about flower arrangements”) that I took a deep breath and with clumsy fingers dialed the number that Francis had supplied.

The phone rang and rang for minutes on end, and I was on the verge of hanging up when a voice on the other end spoke into the receiver, “Abernathy residence, how may I help you?”

It was a young woman, probably a maid. I asked to speak with her employer.

“Excuse me for a moment, sir. Do you have private and immediate business with Mr. Abernathy?”

“Yes, I do.” Behind me, Francis let out a groan.

“It will be just one minute, sir. I’ll get him on.” I said thank you and spent the next few moments waiting in tense silence.

The voice that spoke into the phone was now gruff and unwelcoming, with a tinge of suspicion I recognized from Francis’s own patterns of speech. “Hello, Abernathy speaking, who is this?”

“This is Richard Papen, sir.” I wiped my sweaty palms on the sleek fabric of my pants.

“Do I know you?”

“No, you don’t, sir, but I’ll calling on behalf of your grandson, Francis Abernathy.” I swallowed my fear and decided to get right to the point. “He’d like to inform you that he will not be marrying Priscilla Beaumont in December, then or ever.”

There was a pause that I imagined was the necessary amount of time required for the old man to gather all his remaining rage, and then he asked in a tone brimming with the most shock and malice I’ve ever heard combined in a human voice, “You’re not one of those- those boys, are you? Did Francis put you up to this?”

“I am, sir, and Francis and I would like to be the first to invite you to our wedding this spring.” I winked at him where he spoke gaping across the room, hanging on to every word. “I look forward to meeting you there, sir. Francis has told me wonderful things about you.” With my last gasp of courage I hung up the phone and flung myself down on the couch, giddy with laughter.

Of course there was an actual proposal a few weeks later, in the park on a lovely October afternoon, a joint collaboration between the two of us. In the interests of economy we decided to buy only one ring for each other, a combination of an engagement and wedding band, to be given to each other then but not worn until the ceremony itself, sometime in April or May. Francis gave me a simple golden band from the Victorian era that he had had engraved with my initials, and I knelt by the banks of the duck pond to present him with a ring set with a tiny but perfect sapphire, his birthstone. It was all I could afford on my meager salary, but fortunately he adored it, squealing “Oh, Richard, it’s perfect!” as I slipped it onto his thin freckled finger.

Francis, as it turned out, did not actually mind wedding planning as long as he was actually in love with the person he was getting married to. He originally wanted to have a Catholic wedding, but in that century it was about as likely as Mr. Abernathy calling us and apologizing, so we settled on a small commitment ceremony at a country inn near Hampden. We planned to spend a few days there visiting the college and some of our old friends, and then a week at the country house for our honeymoon, which Francis had purchased from his aunt a few years before. That winter was spent in a glorious haze of apartment hunting and gift wrapping and in my case, poetry writing, composing lines in my head while walking home from the bookstore in the evening, snowy streets of Boston passing by in a blur, so delirious and sick was I with love.

When it finally came time to make the journey, we opted to take the long route in order to stop by Bunny’s grave, alternating our drinking and driving like old times. Because of our ultimate destination, however, we were generally much more cheerful that time around, squabbling over directions and teasing each other like children. With difficulty, we located the small granite monument reading “Edmund Corcoran” and stood there for a moment, hands clasped, both of us thinking our own private thoughts. “Imagine,” said Francis, “if he could see us now,” and I simply nodded, remembering both the Bunny who ceaselessly tormented Francis for who he was and the Bunny who, cruel and misguided though he could be, had truly, deeply cared for his friends. Then it was back on the road, privately wishing that that we could have visited Henry, but lacking the time and money to travel to St. Louis. I like to imagine he was with us in spirit, though, as we traveled away from Shady Brook (“Thank God,” said Francis, “I never want to see that town again,”) and along the Connecticut coast, stealing glimpses of the ocean. We crawled along I-84 through Hartford toward the eastern part of the state, passing smaller, more rural towns whose Anglican names reminded me strongly of Puritanism and country churches, witch-burnings and cornfields in the sun: Manchester, Coventry, Tolland. As storm clouds drifted and tumbled in the sky, we drove up through Springfield and Worcester and Boston until, accompanied by a sigh of relief from Francis, we passed into the familiar territory of Vermont.

The wedding itself took place on a mild day in April, apple blossoms unfurling against the windswept sky and snowdrops poking out their fragile heads from the drifts of snow still gathered in the shadows of trees, Vermont putting on her spring finery for Francis and me. Seven years earlier, nearly to the day, a late-season snowstorm had coated Bunny’s body where it lay at the foot of a lonely ravine and Francis and I shared our first kiss in my dorm room that very night. We did not choose April as our wedding month for the events of the past, but rather because we both remembered how beautiful Hampden was that time of year, but I’m sure it weighed on his mind as much as it did mine the entirety of the week preceding.

It was a very small ceremony. Camilla wired from Virginia with her congratulations and her apologies: her grandmother’s rapidly declining health prevented her from attending; but she promised to visit during our honeymoon if she could possibly get away. We said that we’d be delighted to have her, and true to her word, a bottle of very expensive champagne and attached note arrived in the mail. Overall we had only about a dozen people, the justice of the peace included: Francis’s mother and Chris were there along with his cousin Mildred and some of the younger, more liberal relatives. A few of Francis’s boarding school friends and even a few past lovers attended, and, strangely enough, Sophie Dearbold, whom Francis was delighted to see. We’d sent her an invitation but never dreamed that she’d actually show up, so I blinked in the middle of the ceremony when I saw her standing in the back, pale and uncertain as a ghost. Afterwards I went over to greet her and she threw her arms around me, whispering, “I hope you’re happy with him.”

My parents did not come. I had sent them a card notifying them of our intentions, at Francis’s encouragement, but they never responded. I could not say that I was surprised. My father, especially, had never approved of any choice I made, much less marrying a boy.

Still, it was a lovely wedding, and I must confess that Francis and I both teared up at various points throughout the ceremony, especially while we were reading our vows. When I kissed him he touched his thumb to my cheek, brushing away the wetness that mingled with his own. It was through this mixture of tears and joy that I first spotted a slight, golden-haired figure in a black peacoat standing at the fringe of the crowd, and as it drifted off, became more apparent, even as I doubted my own sight: it was, without a doubt, Charles Macaulay, back from Texas or wherever he now lived, a far-off place Francis and I referred to as the Underworld.

His physical appearance had barely changed, although like Camilla, he seemed unusually tired and wan and upon closer inspection, was going gray at his temples. More characteristically, his fingers were curled around a dangerously full glass of wine. He looked momentarily stunned when I began walking towards him, but pasted on a smile and picked up his hand in a half-hearted wave. “Hi,” he said, in what was an obvious attempt at a cheery tone. “Sorry I’m a bit late to the party. So, you and Francois, old boy?”

“Hello,” Francis replied evenly, meeting his eyes, and I wondered if he still held any bitterness against his old lover or if Charles did the same. Depending on the way you look at it, it was a moment of soap opera-like significance, Francis and his two greatest loves confronting each other at his wedding, and although I was reasonably sure that only Charles knew what happened in my dorm room between Francis and myself that night, I was also sure that Charles knew I was aware of his and Francis’s shared history. A secret history, as are all the histories of boys loving boys, concealed behind closed doors and dark rooms and lies we tell ourselves. How strangely connected were we all, clinging to each other’s history: Henry and Bunny and Camilla, Charles and Francis and me.

“We’re going to take a walk,” I said quietly, slipping my hand into Francis’s and squeezing. He squeezed back, and it was only then that I could feel it trembling. “Would you care to join us?”

An hour later we were strolling through the wooded trails and manicured lawns of Hampden College, Francis and I hand in hand and Charles to my left, lagging slightly behind. He and Francis were attempting to keep up a casual conversation- work, weather, wedding planning- with some degree of awkwardness, and I stayed quiet as we walked, noting the little details of Charles’s appearance. The shoes he wore were of the highest quality but marred with scuff marks, and the suit jacket he was wearing was the one Francis had given him. The sunlight only served to make the gray in his hair even more evident. He had retained some of his old, easygoing charm, but seemed tense in a way I associated more with Francis or myself, but realized I’d seen its mirror image in Camilla’s shoulders. Eventually the conversation turned to Charles’s romantic life, and with a start I realized he was talking about his son.

“...almost eighteen months,” he was saying, eyes alight in a way that reminded me of old Charles, the person that he used to be when we first met. “His name is Brody. I wanted to name him after Julian, actually, but Julie wouldn’t let me, which is funny because it would be like naming him after her, too, don’t you think? But his middle name is Julian. Brody Julian Macaulay.” I gathered that Julie was the married woman whom he had met years ago at rehab.

“That’s a lovely name,” I heard Francis say politely.

“Don’t you think? But I could never tell Julian because I haven’t talked to him since that time with the letter, since he left. Do you know what he’s doing? I’ve asked everyone who might know but no one knows a thing.”

“Francis and I have heard rumors, that’s all,” I answered him. “A little while ago I heard that he might be in Suaoriland, but that’s definitely not true.”

“That’s a shame.” We were on the far side of Commons now, in front of Moorland House. The campus was completely deserted; I assumed it was spring break. “Francis, wasn’t this your old dorm?”

Francis glanced up, features softening with memory. “Good memory. I lived here until the start of junior year. That was my window, up there, see-” he pointed with his free hand- “the one with the cactus and furry purple lampshade.”

“That was where we went to bed together for the first time,” Charles said quietly.

At first I thought I must have misheard him, but once glance at his face reassured me that he was completely serious and for once, sober. Francis seemed completely taken aback, but he steeled his features, sucked in his breath and blurted, “Charles, do you really want to have this conversation now?”

Charles shrugged. “We’ve spent this long not having it,” he said simply. “No time like the present.” When I opened my mouth to say something, God knows what now, he added, “Richard should hear this too.”

We ended up in a tiny coffee shop that had not existed during our time at Hampden, clearly affiliated with the college but located just off campus and patronized only by a few of the more affluent-looking locals. While Charles stirred the whipped cream into his drink, I watched Francis methodically crumble a cookie and litter it over the tabletop. From the general mood at our table, one never would’ve guessed that two of us had gotten married an hour before.

“Charles, this is Francis’s and my wedding day,” I said quietly, touching his hand to attract his attention. “I appreciate you attending, and of course we’re grateful to see you again, but you need to say whatever it is you need to say and get it over with quick.”

“All right.” He lay down his spoon and looked up, and I was startled to see the depth of pain in his clear gray eyes, almost enough to make me want to forgive him for everything- what he had done to Francis, to Camilla, to Henry, to me. “Francis, I just want to start off by saying how happy I am for you and Richard. I’m thankful that you found each other again and I’m glad to see you so in love with each other, because you both couldn’t deserve it more. This might sound odd in light of my past behavior-” Francis trying to interrupt, Charles waving his hand to shut him down- “but I want you to know that. Both of you. At least some of us got some joy out of our time at Hampden.

“Richard, you know I’ve always liked you. You were an awfully good friend to me, and I realize that now, and I never meant for you to get hurt. Francis-” here he paused and took a deep breath, like an instructor in a yoga video- “you and I have been more than friends. You were the first boy I kissed, the first boy I slept with, if that makes you feel any better, but I can’t blame you if it doesn’t. Richard, I assume Francis has already filled you in- but after we went to bed I wouldn’t even acknowledge it except to make fun of him. I knew his feelings for me and I exploited them.”

The words came out mechanical and forced, as if he had practiced them a thousand times in front of a mirror before coming to this little coffee shop in Hampden to say them to our faces. Under the table, Francis grabbed my hand and when Charles wasn’t looking, mouthed something I couldn’t understand. I felt terribly embarrassed for him. I felt terribly embarrassed for us all.

“I was a shitty person,” Charles continued, completely oblivious, “and I guess I’m still a shitty person, but I’m trying to let go of it, you know? To move on. What I did that day doesn’t need to define me. I’m getting better. Camilla and I talk sometimes. I’m in AA, and I’m getting married soon. I have a son. I’m building a new life.” He continued on in this vein, but I don’t really have the heart to recount all of the psychobabble that was spouted. The end result was that my feelings toward him softened a little, but my general opinion remained unchanged. I liked Charles- I always had- and I thought him pretty, but unlike Francis I have a better ability to see past physical appearance into the depths of someone’s soul.

The radio was playing upbeat music, Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill.” A young couple wandered in to look at the menu, the woman with pink hair and a baby strapped to her back, and for some reason this was enough to jar me out of the daze in which I was sitting, listening to Charles drone. A bee spun in circles in the air, the first one I had seen so far that year. It was springtime in Vermont and the world was bursting to life, and it was my wedding day. I pictured a thousand things I’d rather be doing- eating cake, dancing, opening gifts, hiking in the woods, kissing Francis. I stood up, pulling him by the hand, and thanked Charles for coming by.

“You’re leaving? But we just got here!” He looked surprisingly crushed, and for a second I stopped to reconsider, but I was too giddy with possibility to have any pity left for that poor ghost of my past, who had once been my dear friend but who in a sense was now more dead to me than Henry or even Bunny, whom I had helped to kill. The Charles Macaulay that I had loved, that Francis had loved, lived on only in my remaining memories of that year, the pieces that hadn’t been shattered by time or bitterness. The hollow-cheeked man struggling for words in front of me had no more relation to the Charles of the past than a complete stranger.

I told him this, in far fewer words, and his face closed with a kind of dawning understanding. He was resigned to this fate, I realized; this had been what he expected, and he wasn’t going to push it any further. Instead he would go back to his quiet life as a dishwasher in Texas, a bland and forgettable future for someone once brimming with charm and potential, and learn to be content with Julie and his baby son. Hampden, I could tell, would always leave an indelible impression on him, but from this point forth he would try to put it out of his mind.

We said our goodbyes; I hugged him and felt him clutch me for just a little too long. When it was Francis’s turn he tried unsuccessfully to make small talk, inviting Charles to spend a few days with us at the country house for our honeymoon, although we could all tell they were empty words, as hollow and disposable as it turned out one’s past could be. 

“No, I’d better not,” he said. “I appreciate the offer, but I really have to get home. Julie has to work and I’ve been gone a day already.” Shrugging on his coat, he turned as if to leave. Then quite abruptly, he did something I will never quite forget: he leaned forward and kissed Francis on the mouth, very deliberately. He didn’t seem to care that we were in public, either, or that Francis had just been married. It wasn’t seductive or sloppy, but not quite brotherly, either, purposely long and drawn-out, as I had once seen him kiss Camilla. I don’t know why I thought of that just then, but I didn’t have a chance to think about it much at all when he grabbed my shoulders and pressed a quick kiss to my lips- more chaste than Francis’s, but still enough to make me wonder what might’ve happened if it was Charles instead of Francis who wandered into my dorm room all those years ago.

Then he was gone for real, door slamming shut behind him in a swirl of black peacoat.

Francis looked at me, grinning. “Well,” he asked, “what do you want to do now?”

My answer was to kiss him fast and hard, blotting away the taste of Charles with the familiar one of Francis. Francis Abernathy, my husband.

We spent all of the next week at the country house, which was completely, deliciously empty, now that it belonged to Francis alone. The old caretaker couple- I couldn’t quite remember their names- had retired, so we were free to do whatever happened to strike our fancy from day to day, drinking and playing the piano at midnight and burning fires in the great room and skinny-dipping in the lake, only Francis refused to call it that, sneering at the indignity of the word.

“What do you suggest we call it, then?” I asked, mostly to humor him.

He thought for a second. “Clothesless swimming,” he declared.

Camilla came up a few days later, so we had to stop the “clothesless swimming” and settle down to more appropriate pursuits, but it was worth it to have her in the same house as us, within shouting distance after years and years of being apart. It wasn’t until I hugged her again, breathed in the hyacinth perfume of her hair, listen to her sweet voice warble through childhood melodies while washing dishes, that I realized how much I missed her. She was a breath of fresh air after the gloomy presence of her brother, and I was gratified to see that in appearance, at least, she looked a little better. There was some color in her cheeks, and she told me that her she expected to move out after her grandmother’s death and find a job. She even had a roommate and an apartment in Roanoke picked out for when she would need them. We spent hours talking, about nothing at all.

I half-hoped she had forgotten my desperate marriage proposal on the train station platform a year earlier, but no such luck.

“Isn’t it funny,” she said when we were sunning on the side porch one afternoon, after what was possibly one too many drinks, “that out of all of us it ended up being you and Francis who were married.”

“What do you mean?” I asked her, both intrigued and frightened by this line of conversation.

“I don’t know,” she amended, hands wrapped securely around her empty cocktail glass. “If I had to pick a couple out of the six of us...it could have gone so many ways. Henry and I, you and I. Maybe even Francis and I, somehow, I could have been his Priscilla. Francis and my brother, although God knows how that would’ve turned out.”

“You always knew about them?”

“You forget until I was twenty I’d lived with him my entire life,” she answered, fixing her gaze on a moth flitting over the bushes marking the boundary of the yard. “Charles and I didn’t have that many secrets. He pretended he was secretive about things like that, but I could always tell whenever he’d spent the night at Francis’s. And you know Francois- he was never that good with keeping secrets.”

Sunlight hitting her close-cropped hair. Golden strands weaving through a head the color of pure honey. God, she was beautiful. “You know,” I confessed, “I used to think I was in love with you.”

She didn’t answer for a minute. Then she said, “If there’s one thing that I’ve learned in my life, Richard, it’s that love is a fickle thing.” A simple sentiment, but everything sounded especially profound coming from her.

Tennis games and picnics, afternoon drives and gin rummy in the library on rainy days. The week sped by in a glorious swirl of sunshine and laughter, and then we were saying our goodbyes in front of Camilla’s candy-red convertible, trunk popped open and half-loaded with suitcases, all of us crying but none of us ready to let the dream end. It had been a honeymoon plucked from another universe, a happier one, one where no one was dead or gone and the world kept on spinning as it had pre-bacchanal, the only time in my young life I had felt really, truly that I was home. We embraced and kissed and promised to call, but were weighed down by the knowledge that once apart, the connection breaks, and everything we have done and seen and felt disappears.

What else shall I tell you about? There were so many days after that, so many days still left in our lives, that I am at a loss to try to twist a story out of what was for the most part comfortable domesticity. So I’ll start with the little that I know. Charles and Julie, who I heard were eventually married, moved to Mississippi with their son, who is now in elementary school. Charles has a job working as a janitor at a local college, and while I don’t think he’s terribly happy there, I don’t think that he’s terribly unhappy either. He and Camilla still talk sometimes, although mostly over the phone late at night. Camilla, for her part, did move to Roanoke as soon as her grandmother passed away a few months after the wedding. She has a job at a local newspaper and a serious boyfriend and from what I gather from her letters, she’s fairly happy. She comes up to Boston frequently for work and she always visits Francis and I; often we go out to lunch together.

We still don’t know what’s become of Julian, although I take small comfort that he is most likely still alive, as he death would be enough to warrant an obituary notice in one of the major newspapers. Francis is meticulous about combing them, and he swears up and down there was no mention of him anywhere, so his fate is left to my imagination. Francis and I did try stopping by his house once, but we found the place long untenanted, with a weatherbeaten “For Sale” sign still clinging to its post in the front yard.

Priscilla married again, only a year after Francis broke off their engagement, to the son of a wealthy New York banker. They have several children by now and spend their summers on Nantucket, as we’ve learned from our brief run-ins at social functions. Sophie is still single, but she has since then started a successful dance company and recently adopted a border collie puppy. We talk on the telephone sometimes and exchange Christmas cards, but our correspondence often seems forced and polite in the way of casual acquaintances or former close friends.

And what of Francis and I? After our wedding we moved into a slightly larger apartment by the river, and adopted another cat and eventually, a dog. I continued working at the bookstore while focusing on my writing and applying for higher-level positions at local universities. As of this year I’ve been published in several major magazines and started as an assistant Classics professor at Boston College. Francis works too- he’s a “collections researcher” at the Museum of Fine Art, which pays barely anything but makes him feel like he’s contributing to our finances. It’s been a lovely first few years of our marriage, with only minor scrapes and setbacks- rejection letters, arguments over money, typical petty things characteristic of a young couple- but filled with weekends at the country house and picnics in the Public Gardens and dinner parties with our friends and trips to Italy and France every June, worlds and worlds away from how my life might’ve played out if I remained a discontented doctor in Plano. My days have settled down into an easy pattern, a routine calming in its charm and simplicity.

There are six types of love in Greek- a word for every emotion you could possibly experience. I like to think that somehow or another, I’ve felt them all- eros, or passion, for Francis, and philia, or deep friendship, I cherished back at Hampden. Ludus, playful love, I’ve had with Francis and Camilla, and pragma, longstanding love in a relationship, which Francis and I are working toward and will hopefully someday achieve. There’s agape, love for all, which I’m trying to open myself up to, and philautia, love of self, something I’ve been struggling with since my days back in Plano. But I count myself lucky to have experienced deep love in my life, no matter how I choose to label it. It’s love that’s carried me through the years after Hampden, whispered in Greek in Francis’s ear or confessed to Camilla on a subway platform in the rain, and now that I sit down to write this out, the more apparent its role is. It’s love that bound together in the first place, love that I’ve struggled to maintain, love that scratches out our futures on that infinite unseen scroll. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my life, it’s that we all write our own histories.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! This was just an idea I had and I'm not completely done revising it. I'm still trying to figure out how tags work so I might do a little editing later.
> 
> Side note- My dad's college friend married his boyfriend in a country inn in Vermont in the nineties and now they run an ice cream shop together and have three teenage sons. Dreams really do come true.


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